Secrets of Leaves - Victori+Mo, Brooklyn, NY - February/ March 2017

Secrets of Leaves, consists of caulking paintings on wire mesh and sculptures of varying scale, affixed to the gallery walls and hung from the ceiling throughout the space. The walls will be painted with flora motifs, interspersed with leaf sculptures protruding at various intervals creating the sense of not only viewing a jungle, but being in one.

The installation of the work subverts the standard gallery mode of passive viewing within a static white cube; conceived in a manner that the viewer is compelled to navigate around the artworks, stepping over or passing through them. The space necessitates the viewer to be present in order to activate it as a means of drawing attention to the invisible structures we create and how they work to separates us. The viewer, seduced by colors and textures, is lost in dense and tactile walls of tropical foliage, often missing the figures existing within the artwork. Read full press release

Stories of Shadows - Victori+Mo, Brooklyn, NY - December 2016

Stories of Shadows expands upon an iteration of the artist’s Eavesdropping series in which Tarver constructed a fictional narrative around a found photograph of a black woman. Wearing glasses and facing the camera, this woman’s anonymity captivated Tarver, who created a fictional identity for her including details about her domestic life. Tarver named the woman Vera Otis (“veritas,” or, truth) as a reminder that nothing about her is, in fact, true. In many ways, Vera Otis acts as a surrogate for Tarver who, as a woman of color, finds Otis’s life a comforting place to imbue her hopes and fears upon.

Building on the work from the Eavesdropping series, Stories of Shadows will fill in more of the noirish mystery of Vera’s life through eight immersive video works, or, “vignettes” depicting her home environment, played on a loop and projected on the gallery wall. The vignettes are designed to operate independently of each other and out of any prescribed sequence.

To complement the moving image works, a deconstruction of the bedroom from the model house featured in the filmed vignettes will augment the narrative built around Vera’s identity. Composed of elaborate dioramas built inside moving boxes placed throughout the gallery space, the life of this character will be manifested physically for the first time, but only in a limited, circumscribed manner, which provides more questions than answers. Read full press release

Eavesdropping - BRIC Arts Media, Brooklyn, NY - March 2016

Interested in exploring the notions of insider, outsider and the other, artist Adrienne Elise Tarver created an installation that exploited our curiosity of what’s within barriers and questioned what is gained (and at the same time lost) once we’ve looked inside. She did this with both large scale video projections, light box installations, photographs, and hand-drawn wallpaper, exploring the life of a woman from an old photograph she found in a thrift store. Young, black, and female, wearing glasses and facing the camera, Tarver was enticed by this woman's anonymity, and built a story about her, starting with her home and finding the narrative as the pieces came together. Curated by Jenny Gerow, Assistant Curator; BRIC website